


the sea below

by MathildaHilda



Category: Uncharted (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Non-Canonical Character Death, Non-Linear Narrative, Uncharted 4: A Thief's End ending AU, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-14
Updated: 2019-08-14
Packaged: 2020-08-23 15:36:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,763
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20245201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MathildaHilda/pseuds/MathildaHilda
Summary: "What do you think our lives would've been like?" Nathan had asked him in a broken tavern in Libertalia, mug in his hand like a man out of time.Like a man trapped in the jungle of Paradise, just waiting for a King to steal his treasure, where the rum's run dry and the air is thick enough to swallow whole.'Not like this.' Is the one thought that comes to Sam's mind when he picks up Victor's radio. 'Never like this.'





	the sea below

**Author's Note:**

> Title from; 
> 
> “It's better to swim in the sea below  
Than to swing in the air and feed the crow,  
Says jolly Ned Teach of Bristol.”
> 
> ― Benjamin Franklin

Even rusted blades are sharp.

Rusted, worn down, useless blades, are sometimes sharper than common rocks.

So, maybe – just maybe – the blade in Rafe Adler's hand is just a little bit too sharp. A little too sharp compared to all the bullets and the rocks and the iron pipes that stick out of abandoned, old buildings.

Maybe, it's just a little too sharp.

And, maybe, they're all just a little too late.

~

Elena Fisher-Drake tells a lie to a gravestone in a New Orleans cemetery.

Victor Sullivan tells a half-truth of grandeur and angry mercenaries, and how his brother attempted to save the day with a rusted, old flintlock pistol and wet gunpowder.

Sam Drake _("Samuel makes me sound like an old man, Nathan.")_ doesn't say a word. Only stares with those same dark eyes that saw the inside of a prison for thirteen years, and the other two trapped in an uncomfortable lie no one knew quite how to tell just right.

Nathan Drake, ever the optimist with a sharp tongue, doesn't have any space left to say a single word.

~

Rusted blades are sometimes too sharp. Too quick. (Too much.)

Sam takes a knife crafted from plastic, rubber and rusted metal, to the gut, one time in one of the riots that followed their inglorious escape. It takes days for it to be properly looked at, and by then, he pretends not to feel anything.

Sam takes a knife to the gut, just below the lung, and can't help but stare at it for such a long time that Sully hits him upside the head just so that he will turn his head around and allow him to tend to the wound.

Sam Drake has long since stopped pretending that he doesn't feel anything.

(Rusted blades sometimes look too much like crimson wounds on pale skin.

It sometimes looks too much like little brothers lacking their sunshine smiles.)

~

Drake was supposed to be a new start for both of them.

But they've fallen enough times now – from planes and buildings and mountains – that the promise of a new start seems so far of now that Drake is all there is – all there's ever been – and Morgan is long forgotten in Boston.

Boston, where Mom is. (Boston, where everything old is forgotten and hardly worth digging up.)

Boston, where Sam brings Elena and Cassie when the latter has just turned five. Brings them there, pats the soil, and says, _'take care of Nathan, Mom.'_

Cassie, so young and blue-eyed and with only a memory of her father in her mind or body, smiles his telltale smile when Sam breaks into a story of how they broke into their mother's study and found the remarkable story of Sir Francis Drake and his heirs.

Elena looks on with her own, lonely smile, and replies to the company's suggestion of Cape Horn with the press of a thumb and the promise of arriving there within the week.

(They leave New Orleans after that, but they always make a point, now and again, to return, if only just to say goodbye before too long.)

~

"We changed our names, remember?" Sam tells a frustrated young Nathan, sometime before Sam gets himself sent to jail, and Nathan finds Sir Francis' ring in all the commotion that follows.

Sam smiles at the ring later, long before Nate loses it to another lost city, and before Sam feels the violent, scorching pinpricks across his back.

He smiles at the ring, at his brother, and nudges his head. Says a few, carefully chosen words to Mister Sullivan.

He smiles that same smile, almost at the very least, when he slips through Nathan's fingers.

_("One last assurance, little brother." _He tells the ghost only he sees.

_"Assurance of what?" _The ghost asks._ "That it'll be okay, Nathan."_

The ghost, at that, doesn't say a word_.)_

"Yeah, I know. It just slips, sometimes, Y'know?" Nathan says, shame so evident in his voice.

"There's no shame in it, Nathan. It'll be okay."

~

It's not Sam that pulls Nathan from the belly of Avery's ship. It's not Sam that rescues Nathan from beneath a pile of treasure they'd been seeking most of their lives.

It's not Sam that takes Rafe Adler's sword to the gut.

It's not Sam that says, "I'm fine. It'll be okay."

It's not Sam. But, he oh so wishes that it was.

Maybe he would've noticed, hadn't adrenaline, and his pain made it impossible for his eyes to focus on the meager trail of blood in the ocean's deep blue waters.

Maybe he would've noticed if he hadn't fallen asleep so soon after they left the island and the treasure and the dead men behind.

_Maybe_ is the biggest word there is, his mother had once said. _Maybe_, and _almost_.

They almost made it home.

But almost is so very far from okay.

Elena sleeps, Victor talks through a cigar in his mouth, and Nathan's long since fallen asleep with his head in Elena's lap.

Sam sleeps, for a while, and wakes up with a question on his tongue.

It doesn't get very far.

Instead, he asks the question to a gravestone a few days before he sets off with Victor to search for some wannabe version of Atlantis.

(But, if Nathan Drake could find El Dorado, Sam Drake might just be able to find Atlantis.)

"What did it feel like for you to step where the greatest pirates of all time, once had stepped?" Is the question he wishes he'd asked. Thought about but never had time to ask.

"What did it feel like?" Is the question he asks. There's no reply but the wind and the promise of rain.

~

Whenever a tip comes through the channels and reaches Sully, he tips his head, pulls the cigar from his lips, and says no.

He says no, but only when there are pirates involved.

Pirate gold is cursed gold; someone had once told him

He doesn't tell Sam of the tips for pirate gold, and Sam doesn't tell him about the ones that come through Chloe Frazer, either.

No one mentions pirates anymore, it seems, until Cassie's pirate phase brings forth a watery smile and the promise of ghost stories.

No one mentions them once Cassie moves on to cowboys, but they still, all of them, think about them.

(_"He always wanted to be a pirate."_ Sam says after one too many drinks at a bar downtown.

_"Who?"_ The pretty woman asks, cocks her head, and presses the drink to her lips.

_"My brother. Guess he kinda became one too."_)

~

Sam thinks, where he kneels by his brother's side in a plane too far away from any kind of voluntary airstrip, of the times Nathan told him so many similar things had happened.

Things that could've been prevented had he only chosen a different path — a different route to the same goal.

Sam cradles his baby brother's head in his hands and thinks about just how much Nathan looks like Mom.

(_"It'll be okay."_ Mom had said.

_"You look after Nathan, and then everything will be okay."_

Everything was always okay for Cassandra Morgan's boys up until the day Dad sent them away, and Sam 'died' and now this.

This thing that, despite everything, can't be changed.

_"Take care of Nathan, Sam."_)

"What do you think our lives would've been like?" Nathan had asked him in a broken tavern in Libertalia, mug in his hand like a man out of time.

Like a man trapped in the jungle of Paradise, just waiting for a King to steal his treasure, where the rum's run dry and the air is thick enough to swallow whole.

_'Not like this.'_ Is the one thought that comes to Sam's mind when he picks up Victor's radio. _'Never like this.'_

~

Elena Fisher-Drake tells a truth to a gravestone in New Orleans, all tired smiles and tearless eyes.

"Sam's suggesting Cassandra, after your Mom. I thought you'd like that."

She pauses, presses her palm flat against the shortly cropped grass between her and the stone.

"He _also_ suggested Francis, if it's a boy, but I'm not a fan of option two." She says and scrounges up her nose in just the way that she can still hear how he used to laugh when she did it.

"And, there's only one Nathan Drake." She adds and moves the hand to the stone, smooth, black stone under her calloused fingers.

"I've got time to think about it, though. I just wish you were here to think with me."

~

_"What does is it feel like? Being shot?" Nathan asks him a year before he gets to feel it himself. Sam hisses at first and readjusts Nathan's grip on the needle and placement on his skin._

_It's a graze, but it hurts like hell, nonetheless. _

_"Like a cannonball, now hurry up." He's impatient when he's in pain or simply not in the mood, but so is anyone they've ever met, it seems._

_"But it's so small," Nathan says, later, and holds the shrapnel between his fingers, fingertips coated in his brother's blood._

_"Yeah, well, even pinpricks can feel like cannonballs, little brother."_

_"Needles, too?" Nathan asks and stabs him in the arm._

Sam shivers in his parka, somewhere in the Norwegian fjords, when the memory comes, unannounced and unwelcome, and he wipes his nose and reaches for the next ledge before Chloe or Nadine can comment on his lack of progress.

After that moment, he'd referred to every bullet wound as a cannonball until Nathan up and got himself shot for a useless trinket that turned out to be pretty damn valuable. And after that, all Nathan could refer the feeling to was bees.

_"Bees? Why the hell bees?"_

_"Because it stings. You just have low pain tolerance, that's all."_

Nadine spots the ship they're looking for, and, of course, it takes their breaths away, the tiny clouds of air disappearing for several moments until they almost slip into the icy depths of the fjord in search for whatever treasure the Vikings might have left behind.

He calls Victor sometime between Chloe handing him a rusted dagger of bone and Andersen's men chasing them deep into underground caves.

He keeps that dagger in his pocket until later when Andersen himself claws his fingers into his face and yells of ruination and shit Sam cares very little about.

He keeps the dagger, rusted blade, and smooth bone, until Andersen takes it with him, deep into the depths.

Sometimes, even rusted blades are sharp.

**Author's Note:**

> went through my unfinished drafts, found this, rewrote it, and now i threw it out there
> 
> this thing is 3 freaking years old and im amazed i even found it again


End file.
